adjective_ "hollow" and uses it thus
in the line:

"Houten are wordes for to telle his doe," _i.e._,
Hollow are words to tell his doings.

Still again, in a passage already quoted,[17] it is told how the "Wynde
hurled the Battayle"--Rowleian for a small boat--"agaynste an Heck."
_Heck_ in this and other passages was a puzzle. From the context it
obviously meant "rock," but where did Chatterton get it? Mr. Skeat
explains this. _Heck_ is a provincial word signifying "rack," i.e.,
"hay-rack"; but Kersey misprinted it "rock," and Chatterton followed him.
A typical instance of the kind of error that Chatterton was perpetually
committing was his understanding the "Listed, bounded," _i.e., edged_ (as
in the "list" or selvage of cloth) for "bounded" in the sense of
_jumped,_ and so coining from it the verb "to liss"=to jump:

"The headed javelin lisseth here and there."

Every page in the Rowley poems abounds in forms which would have been as
strange to an Englishman of the fifteenth as they are to one of the
nineteenth century. Adjectives are used for nouns, nouns for verbs, past
participles for present infinitives; and derivatives and variants are
employed which never had any existence, such as _hopelen_=hopelessness,
and _anere_=another. Skeat says, that "an analysis of the glossary in
Milles's edition shows that the genuine old English words correctly used,
occurring in the Rowleian dialect, amount to only about _seven_ per cent,
of all the old words employed." It is probable that, by constant use of
his manuscript glossary, the words became fixed in Chatterton's memory
and he acquired some facility in composing at first hand in this odd
jargon. Thus he uses the archaic words quite freely as rhyme words,
which he would not have been likely to do unless he had formed the habit
of thinking to some degree, in Rowleian.

The question now occurs, apart from the tragic interest of Chatterton's
career, from the mystery connected with the incubation and hatching of
the Rowley poems, and from their value as records of a very unusual
precocity--what independent worth have they as poetry, and what has been
the extent of their literary influence? The dust of controversy has long
since settled, and what has its subsidence made visible? My own belief
is that the Rowley poems are interesting principally as literary
curiosities--the work of an infant phenomenon--and that they have little
importance in themselves,